“The Dangers of Promoting Peace During Times of [Cold] War: Gene Weltfish, the
FBI, and the 1949 Waldorf Conference for World Peace.” Paper presented at
Invited Session on “Anthropologists, Promoters of War or Peace?” at the annual
meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, Illinois, November
20, 2003.

Abstract:

This paper
examines Gene Weltfish’s participation in the 1949 Waldorf Astoria Cultural
Scientific Conference for World Peace as a means of exploring the historically
negative consequences for anthropologists and other scholar-activists engaged in
promoting peace during times of war. I argue that scholars pursuing radical
critiques of the nature of conflict are marginalized and targeted for harassment
by academic administrators and agencies such as the FBI. Under such
contingencies we should not be surprised to find anthropologists learning to
avoid the promotion of peace. The Waldorf Conference was a watershed for the
post-war intellectual left and brought together intellectuals from the radical
and progressive left and the conservative right to discuss the state of world
peace at the dawn of the cold war--though the setting of the conference was
hardly neutral as recent scholarship establishes that the conference was
infiltrated by the CIA at its inception. Gene Weltfish’s lengthy remarks at this
conference survive in her FBI file, and demonstrate a complex Marxist critique
anticipating many of the critiques of colonialism to be developed decades later
by such scholars as Kathleen Gough or Talad Asad. Weltfish argued there could be
no peace while international economic markets thrived under conditions of
racism, and she identified the neo-colonialist economic conditions prevailing in
the post-war world, describing the role that public and private American
interests played in these emerging conditions. This analysis heightened the
FBI’s suspicions of Weltfish and led the FBI to expand their surveillance and
harassment of her.